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On the go with Padre Alberto

With one hand, Padre Alberto grips
the wheel of his blue Isuzu Rodeo as he heads south on the Florida interstate.
With the other hand, he punches in numbers on his cell phone. At this hour—11 a.m.—he’s supposed to be in
front of the cameras at Channel 41, a Spanish language television station in
Miami, except he’s just left his rectory in Pompano Beach, 35 miles away.

His assistant has already alerted
the show’s producers that Padre Alberto is running late, but he’s more
concerned about another deadline: his 1 p.m. mass on Radio Paz (WACC-830 AM),
the station he runs for the Archdiocese of Miami.

“Monica,” he says into the phone.
“We’re going to tape, right? Do you know how long the taping will be?”

He hangs up and shakes his head.
“It’s amazing. If you would have told me 15 years ago when I entered the
seminary, ‘Albert, you’re going to be a parish priest, a radio director, a
television personality and a columnist, I would have said you’re high and on drugs.’
”

But a dizzying and high-profile
career is reality for Father Albert R. Cutié, (pronounced Koo-Tee-Ay) 33, a
handsome six-footer with glossy black hair, an apricot complexion and piercing
blue eyes known to his fans in Latin America and America’s booming Hispanic
enclaves as “Padre Alberto.” The son of
Cuban immigrants, his bilingual fluency, telegenic charisma and unalloyed
passion for people and his faith have made him the only Catholic priest in
America who’s also an international media star.

From 1998 until 2001, he hosted an
afternoon talk show on Telemundo, the country’s second-largest Spanish language
network. Reruns of the “Padre Alberto” show continue to appear throughout Latin
America. His televised bilingual Sunday mass is seen around the world. He’s on
the radio and the Internet, (www.padrealberto.net)
and writes a five-day-a-week advice column in Miami’s Spanish newspaper El Nuevo Herald. Every six weeks, he
jets down to the Dominican Republic to tape a talk show, Padre Alberto y sus amigos, co-produced by a Catholic and secular
channel.

Of course,
there are priests on television, hosting shows on EWTN and other religious
programming. But not since Bishop Fulton J. Sheen beat Milton Berle in the
ratings wars of 1950s television has a Catholic priest enjoyed such prime time
access to the secular air waves.

But as glamorous as these gigs
sound, they don’t really define him, Padre Alberto says. “I’m a priest of the
archdiocese of Miami. That’s the first thing that I am.”

“My mission is
the mission of any priest. To say what needs to be said in today’s world, to
speak with clarity, with truth and to try to bring people to an understanding
of who God is in their life.”

A convergence
of personality, aptitude and boundless energy combine to give Padre Alberto an
extraordinary opportunity to wield the tools of modern communications
technology—radio, television and the computer—to market that faith to the
fastest-growing immigrant class in America—35 million Hispanics, most of whom
are Catholic.

His
mission—judging from half a day spent in his company—a 17-hour marathon that
began with prayers at 6 a.m. and won’t end until after 10 at night when he
returns to the rectory after a client party for Radio Paz advertisers—keeps him
racing from laptop computer to microphone and altar to television camera at
breakneck speed, usually a few steps behind schedule.

Eight hours on the go with Padre Alberto offers a snapshot
of what he calls his “crazy life” and the intimate relationship with God that
propels him on this nonstop journey to sell his faith to the masses. “It’s a
mission that has to do with reaching out,” he explains. “A still bee gathers no
honey, so you gotta keep moving.”

* * *

“Gigi” doesn’t
want to live with her mother-in law.

“I don‘t blame her,” Padre Alberto says,
peering at his laptop screen. It’s 8 a.m. and he’s already been at his rectory
desk for two hours banging out his newspaper column, “Consejos De Amigo”
(“Advice from a Friend.”)

Dressed in black pants and a collarless white
shirt, the dregs of his instant oatmeal at his side, he’s already tackled three
letters, including one from a woman who complains her husband isn’t as
interested in sex as she is. “I told them to seek marriage counseling.”

“They’re buying a new house. The
husband wants the mother to move in with them. So you can imagine she’s not a
happy camper.”

He starts typing, and for several
minutes, gentle tapping is the only sound in the room. His reply is diplomatic,
but firm: “I didn’t trash the mother-in-law, but I told them it was better if
they lived on their own.”

“Gigi’s” problem is a familiar one
in Hispanic families. “In our American culture,” he explains, “at 18 everybody goes
to college and they move on. In the Latin culture, people stay around until
they get married and sometimes they get married and they still stay around and
people suffer a lot. When they come to this country they find another culture.
There’s a clash.”

Padre Alberto’s own family fled
communist Cuba before he was born in 1969.

“I was conceived in Spain, born in Puerto
Rico, raised in Miami,” he says, and switches easily between Spanish and
English. “I live in bilingual mode.”

He estimates that 80 percent of his
ministry connects him to Hispanics, but his background gives him an uncanny
ability, his friends say, to bridge Anglo and Hispanic communities. “He has his
feet grounded in both cultures,” says Father John Hays, a close friend from
seminary days. “He can articulate the truths of the faith to both.”

Whatever language,
Padre Alberto is articulate, affable and self-possessed, able to preach a
sermon or host a talk show without notes. He appears genuinely energized and
content with his grueling multi-task life.
“I’ve always been the classic extrovert,” he says. “My seminary rector
once said, ‘Albert sweats confidence.’ ”

He runs spellcheck and transmits
the finished column to the newspaper. As the modem’s wheezy squeal fills the
room, he checks his watch.

“We go on the air in like six
minutes,” he says, reaching for the day’s newspapers and his breviary to
prepare for “Al Dia,” a half-hour radio chat he hosts five mornings a week from
the rectory.

At 8:28 a.m.,
Padre Alberto straps on a pair of Sony Dynamic Stereo Professional headphones
and flips switches on the small stack of sophisticated equipment that occupies
a corner of his desk and connects him to the radio station. “Three buttons and
you’re on the air.”

Audio equipment has been part of
his life since he was a 12-year-old disc jockey named “DJ Albert” who played
weddings, school dances and bar mitzvahs. “I love technical things. If I wasn’t
a priest I’d probably be a sound engineer.”

His senior year in high school he
hosted a youth show on Miami public radio, envisioned having a family, but by
then the secular world had competition. “I started meeting young priests who
impressed me as very happy people and people that produced something
worthwhile.” At 18, he bequeathed his sound equipment to his DJ buddies and
entered the seminary. After his 1995 ordination as a diocesan priest, he served
a Fort Lauderdale parish and in 1998 was assigned to St. Patrick Church in
Miami Beach where he taught religion in elementary and high school.

At 8:30 a.m., he
leans into the microphone and Padre Alberto is on the air, greeting his morning
listeners. “Muy pero muy buenos dias
amigos,’ he says. “Como estan ustedes.”
With the morning papers on one side and English and Spanish breviaries on the
other, he spends thirty minutes breezily discussing the day’s headlines with
three colleagues in the Miami studio—the expulsion of Ohio Congressman James
Traficant, arrests on Wall Street, the Pope’s visit to Canada—and reminds his
audience that it’s the feast of Saint James.

At peak hours, the station draws
100,000 listeners, immigrants from “practically from every country in Latin
America. Radio Paz is their connection
to their places of origin, their faith, their traditions.

“We’re the alternative,” he says. “You don’t tune
in Radio Paz to hear the vulgarity that other radio stations carry. You tune in
because it’s a family message.”

He signs off and puts on another
hat. He’s been administrator of San Isidro Church since last May when the
archbishop appointed him to replace the pastor who was suspended after a former
altar boy filed a lawsuit accusing the former pastor of sexual molestation.

He checks in with a locksmith
consolidating the parish keys, the crew repairing the rectory’s leaky roof
(“These are parts of priests’ lives that people don’t know.”) In the parish
hall, he stops to chat with a young man who’s leaving to enter the seminar.

Back at his laptop, “José, the
confused” wants to know if a Protestant minister has the power to heal. Most of
the letters Padre Alberto’s receives (about 900 a week), like “Gigi’s”, seek
guidance on family issues, but many want help with spiritual quandaries.

“José, the confused” is told, “God
can use anyone,” although Padre Alberto draws a theological distinction. “In
fact, no minister can heal. Only God can produce miracles.”

Whether it’s as a talk show host or
Latin “Dear Abby,” he draws his credibility from a church-centered Hispanic
culture. “People don’t go to therapy in Latin America,” he says. “They go to
the priest.”

What El Nuevo Herald’s mostly Catholic readers get, says Gloria Leal,
his editor, is Padre Alberto’s brand of “compassion and no-nonsense attitude.”
In a recent column his advice to a woman in an extra-marital affair was blunt:
“Everyone has a right to be happy. No one has the right to destroy a marriage.”

“Life is not about
instant satisfaction,” he says now. “It’s about getting up every day and trying
to be a better person. God’s not finished with any of us yet. If you’re
struggling and you have issues, welcome to the club.”

*
* *

Billboards flank the Palmetto Expressway under darkening
skies as Padre Alberto approaches Miami later that morning, behind schedule for
his TV taping and radio mass. The
nonstop stream of commercialism provides a backdrop for an impassioned mini-sermon.

“They’re making big money selling
mediocre messages. We’ve got the best message in the world and we don’t know
how to sell it. Talking in street terms, the Church stinks at marketing.

“We don’t have priests that can
speak to cameras,” he complains. “We don’t have priests that can speak into
microphones without being afraid or without using the same monotonous boring
tone that they use in their sermons. You can’t speak to the world today in that
tone. It doesn’t work.”

His media role models wear the
cloth: Bishop Sheen, Mother Teresa and his hero, Pope John Paul II—“the most
photographed man in the world. In the old days that would be considered lack of
humility. Nowadays it’s necessary.”

“It’s a tricky thing,” he acknowledges as
lunchtime traffic zips past. “But it’s not foreign to the church. St. Paul was
a marketer of the faith in the first century. I’m convinced that if St. Paul
had satellite and TV cameras and all that, boy, then he’d be there like a bear.
He wouldn’t miss a moment.” He chuckles, savoring the vision.

Dodging rain puddles, Padre Alberto
ducks into Channel 41 for his guest appearance on Puente de Amor (“Bridge of Love”) which unites long-lost loved
ones. “Here’s the worst part of TV,” he says, sitting in a tiny room, his
clerical collar protected by a pinstripe smock as a makeup woman applies face
powder with a sponge and brush, coats his lips with gloss and runs a pencil
over his eyebrows. His thick hair, gelled that morning, is left alone.

He tapes the interview and by 12:53
p.m., he’s back on the highway, racing to the station for mass. He calls ahead
and arranges for the noon show to stay on the air until he arrives.

In 1998, Padre Alberto was a rookie
parish priest when Telemundo launched a nationwide talent hunt for a new
program. What is a talk show but a secular version of the confession? reasoned
Nely Galán, the executive who conceived the idea. And who better to host it,
especially for a Hispanic audience, than a priest?

“To have a priest conduct a show
makes a lot more sense than anybody else,” Padre Alberto agrees. “When you bury
a three a year-old girl who’s drowned in a pool and when you deal with a mother
whose teenaged daughter told her I’m pregnant and when you deal with the
husband who can’t live because his wife died of cancer you develop a real sense
of understanding people’s suffering and pain.”

Producers interviewed 500
Spanish-speaking clerics before selecting Padre Alberto, but he wasn’t sold on
the idea at first.

“I’m not sure this is what God wants,” he
recalls telling Galán. “If God wants it I’ll do it. But if God doesn’t want it,
I want it less.”

He got permission from the church which
received an honorarium for each show filmed. “The bishop said, “ ‘Albert,
there’s nothing the church can’t talk about, so just go for it’ .”

On Sept. 27, 1998, the “Padre
Alberto” show faced off against against Cristina, the reigning talk show queen
on rival Univision. “I was ordained
Padre Alberto. They turned it into a brand,” he says with a chuckle.

The format and themes
were familiar—truculent teens, troubled spouses, Siamese twins, infidelity,
incest, homosexuality —except that the earnest host wore a clerical suit and
led the audience in prayer before the cameras rolled. No chair throwing and Padre
Alberto tried to avoid preaching. “You want to hear me preach,” he says. “Come
to Mass.”

Aided by psychologists
and other experts, he preached reconciliation not rage. Fame followed with
profiles in the New York Times, Newsweek and TV appearances. The Washington Post called Padre Alberto “a
combination of the pope, Ricky Martin and Oprah, who is as apt to talk about
sex as salvation.”

He kept his day job at
the parish and taped six shows a week. It was a killer schedule made worthwhile
by compliments like the one from a Jesuit in the Dominican Republic: “He said
to me, ‘Father, the best thing your show has done for the people here is that
there’s a lot of issues that they would never talk with a priest about. And
ever since they saw you they say, ‘Father Alberto talked about this issue and I
want to talk to you about it.”

But
after 400 shows, Padre Alberto fell victim to trash TV and low ratings. “The
cheapest most vulgar show when they put it in the same time period I was on it
gets double the ratings,” he says. “The reason is people are attracted to the
slapping, the hitting, the insulting.” Telemundo replaced Padre Alberto with
Laura, a blonde Jerry Springer-clone from Peru. Galán, the show’s creator,
filmed a crossover pilot in English, but networks have yet to bite.

At 1:13 p.m.,
Padre Alberto pulls into the Radio Paz parking lot.

Inside a chilly studio, a chalice,
cruets, missal and multi-line phone await along with the day’s congregation:
five station workers, who soon will be joined by callers, many of them shut-in
who call in with prayer requests. Padre
Alberto dons a white linen alb and
scarlet stole. He puts on a headset, takes a seat in front of a blue Radio Paz
microphone and celebrates “La Santa Misa,” alternating the familiar rhythms of
mass by hitting a phone button and answering, “Intencíons por favor.”

After Mass, he gathers up a station
volunteer’s family, visiting from Chile, and heads off to lunch in Miami Beach.

“There’s not a person who’s around
him that doesn’t feel his energy,” says Anna del Rio, the station’s public
relations director, “Wherever Father Albert is people want to be there.” Del
Rio, 23, and her fiancé like to hang out with the priest. “He doesn’t get
shocked by anything. He lives with his feet in this world.” Then she adds.
“He’s the most traditional liberal priest in the world.”

It’s a paradox
that illuminates the appeal of Padre Alberto as well the source of his
seemingly boundless evangelical energy.

“You’re trying to
connect a very old institution that’s perceived by many as outdated and
old-fashioned, to connect it with reality and today,” he says. “What I spend
most of my time doing—I do it on the radio, I do it on TV, I do it in my
column—is try to speak to people in very down to earth language without using a
lot of theological mumbo-jumbo. We talk about what’s up –what’s up with life.”

After a quick
lunch of fried eggs and rice, a Cuban staple, he’s back at the wheel. From 4
p.m.-6 p.m.—“Catholic drive time”—he’ll host another call-in show, “Direct Line,”
then do an interview with CNN Español
about the Pope’s visit to Canada before the party for his station’s clients.
With a few minutes to spare, he zips over to St. Patrick where he spent four
years until his recent transfer. Spotting a crew replacing windows at the
elementary school where he taught catechism, he brakes to a halt and hops out
to talk with Smitty, the Haitian-American maintenance chief.

Back in his car, he picks up his cell phone and calls the station. “Hey! How are you? I’m on my way. Be there in five minutes.” Padre Alberto looks both ways and shoots back into traffic.

Published in Catholic Digest and the St. Petersburg Times, 2002.

Postscript: Profiles often veer between hatchet jobs and hagiography. As hard as I tried to find skeletons in his closet during my reporting; there was never a hint of any improprieties in any of the numerous profiles written about Padre Alberto. I never could find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. However, it turned out Padre Albert was keeping an explosive secret. In 2009, seven years after this profile appeared, a photographer caught him on a beach kissing a woman later identified as his girlfriend. He said it was the only time in 22 years as a priest that he violated the oath of celibacy. He later married, become a father and is now an Episcopal priest, a faith that allow priests to marry. He had a short-lived television show in 2011. In 2012, he published “Dilemma: A Priest’s Struggle with Faith and Love.” In it, he traced his relationship with his girlfriend to 1998.

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